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Vault-Tec Industries[1] is the corporation that was contracted by the United States government before the Great War to design and produce the Vault system, an endeavor that was officially code-named Project Safehouse. Its corporate headquarters was located in downtown Washington, DC. The first demonstration Vault in the project was constructed beneath metropolitan Los Angeles, and soon many others were built all around the country. The Vaults are all very similar in their basic functions, but were sometimes constructed according to different designs, as the Vaults of the West Coast differ from those constructed in the vicinity of Washington, DC.

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The Vaults, however, were never actually intended to save the citizens of the United States from the ravages of a nuclear war or a viral pandemic. With a population of almost 400 million by 2077, the U.S. would have needed over 400,000 Vaults to protect every man, woman and child, and Vault-Tec was commissioned by the American government to build only 122 such Vaults. The true reason for the construction of the Vaults was to allow the government to secretly study pre-selected segments of the American population to observe how they would react to the stresses of isolation and how successfully they would re-colonize the devastated Earth after the Vault opened. It was the Enclave, a secret shadow organization of federal officials and corporate executives within the federal government that used the Vault-Tec company to set up this sinister experiment. Ultimately, the Vaults were created not to save American citizens, but to carry out often immoral experiments on live human subjects. The purposes and experiments carried out in each Vault varied, including the development of super soldiers (Vault 92), the creation of an entire population of human clones (Vault 108), the use of the FEV Virus on an unwitting test population (Vault 87),the frequent use of psychoactive drugs (Vault 106), the extended use of a virtual reality simulator on a population (Vault 112), and so on. In Fallout 3, Vault 101 was subject to a "Never To Be Opened" policy so the inhabitants were not allowed to leave and were intended to be made subject to the dictatorial whims of an all-powerful Vault Overseer.

The creation of the large emergency shelters were not its only products, as Vault-Tec released several other handbooks (such as "Coping with Mr. Virus" or "How to Cook a Rat") that concerned survival during and after other global disasters, with the Vault Dweller's Survival Guide being only one of many. Future-Tec, a division of Vault-Tec, developed the G.E.C.K., the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, for use by the Vault dwellers after they emerged from their Vault into a post-apocalyptic wasteland so that they could rebuild human civilization.

Like many major military contractors before the Great War, as Vault-Tec grew in profitability and responsibility, it began to develop highly experimental, advanced and secret technologies. In time, Vault-Tec was so thoroughly integrated with top-secret military research done by the Pentagon that it had practically become a department of the U.S. government. However, the company still remained in private hands. Yet, because of its strong connection to the American government the principal personnel of Vault-Tec - its executives, top scientists and engineers, and so on - had to be aware of the true purpose of the Vaults and Project Safehouse, and they had access to the technology used throughout the program since they were the developers of the experimental protocols to be used on each Vault's population. Regardless of the American government's directives, Vault-Tec's high-ranking personnel had no intention of submitting to a lottery and living underground with a bunch of human cattle in the Vault facilities that they had constructed which were intentionally defective. Thus, Vault-Tec created their own private emergency shelter facility for their top employees and their families that was removed from the larger Vault network - and kept its existence secret from the U.S. government. This facility is now known as the Secret Vault.

Vault-Tec did not stop there. This secret, private installation was used to research new, more advanced technologies that would benefit mankind in the midst of post-nuclear environment. This initiative included some extensive research with the "forced evolution virus" (FEV) the results of which, unlike the government-controlled research on the virus' uses at Vault 87, was also kept secret from the government. It is known that the FEV stored in the Secret Vault was highly modified to achieve its original goals and avoid sterility among those subjects infected and mutated by it, however, this modification proved unsuccessful.

Other Vault-Tec projects that were intended for the corporation's own use included the development of their own robotic systems, a special biological weapons program (the results of which were probably the creation of a unique race of Radroaches and a variation of the Deathclaw), advanced biomedical research on the effects of rapid cell regeneration, and even an attempt to create a model of Power Armor to be used by Vault-Tec personnel.